Night Over Water

passengers were royalty, movie stars, chairmen of large corporations and presidents of small countries.

Tom Luther was none of those things. He was rich, but he had worked hard for his money, and he would not normally have squandered it on luxury. However, he had needed to familiarize himself with the plane. He had been asked to do a dangerous job for a powerful man—very powerful indeed. He would not be paid for his work, but to be owed a favor by such a man was better than money.

The whole thing might yet be called off: Luther was waiting for a message giving him the final go-ahead. Half the time he was eager to get on with it; the other half, he hoped he would not have to do it.

The plane came down at an angle, its tail lower than its nose. It was quite close now, and Luther was struck again by its tremendous size. He knew that it was 109 feet long and 152 feet from one wingtip to the other, but the measurements were just numbers until you actually saw the goddamn thing floating through the air.

For a moment it looked as if it were not flying but falling, and would crash into the sea like a dropped stone and sink to the bottom. Then it seemed to hang in the air, just above the surface, as if dangling on a string, for a long moment of suspense. At last it touched the water, skipping the surface, splashing across the tops of the waves like a stone thrown skim-wise, sending up small explosions of foam. But there was very little swell in the sheltered estuary, and a moment later, with an explosion of spray like the smoke from a bomb, the hull plunged into the water.

It cleaved the surface, plowing a white furrow in the green, sending twin curves of spray high in the air on either side; and Luther thought of a mallard coming down on a lake with spread wings and folded feet. The hull sank lower, enlarging the sail-shaped curtains of spray that flew up to left and right; then it began to tilt forward. The spray increased as the plane leveled out, submerging more and more of its whale’s belly. Then at last its nose was down. Its speed slowed suddenly, the spray diminished to a wash, and the aircraft sailed the sea like the ship it was, as calmly as if it had never dared to reach for the sky.

Luther realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a long relieved sigh. He started humming again.

The plane taxied toward its berth. Luther had disembarked there a week ago. The dock was a specially designed raft with twin piers. In a few minutes, ropes would be attached to stanchions at the front and rear of the plane and it would be winched in, backward, to its parking slot between the piers. Then the privileged passengers would emerge, stepping from the door onto the broad surface of the sea-wing, then onto the raft, and from there up a gangway to dry land.

Luther turned away, then stopped suddenly. Standing at his shoulder was someone he had not seen before: a man of about his own height, dressed in a dark gray suit and a bowler hat, like a clerk on his way to the office. Luther was about to pass on; then he looked again. The face beneath the bowler hat was not that of a clerk. The man had a high forehead, bright blue eyes, a long jaw, and a thin, cruel mouth. He was older than Luther, about forty; but he was broad-shouldered and seemed fit. He looked handsome and dangerous. He stared into Luther’s eyes.

Luther stopped humming.

The man said: “I am Henry Faber.”

“Tom Luther.”

“I have a message for you.”

Luther’s heart skipped a beat. He tried to hide his excitement, and spoke in the same clipped tones as the other man. “Good. Go ahead.”

“The man you’re so interested in will be on this plane on Wednesday when it leaves for New York.”

“You’re sure?”

The man looked hard at Luther and did not answer.

Luther nodded grimly. So the job was on. At least the suspense was over. “Thank you,” he said.

“There’s more.”

“I’m listening.”

“The second part of the message is: don’t let us down.”

Luther took a deep breath. “Tell them not to worry,” he said, with more confidence than he really felt. “The guy may leave Southampton, but he’ll never reach New York.”

Imperial Airways had a flying-boat facility just across the estuary from Southampton Docks. Imperial’s mechanics serviced the Clipper, supervised by the Pan American flight engineer. On this trip the engineer was Eddie Deakin.

It was a big job, but they had three days. After discharging its passengers at Berth 108, the Clipper taxied across to Hythe. There, in the water, it was maneuvered onto a dolly; then it was winched up a slipway and towed, looking like a whale balanced on a baby carriage, into the enormous green hangar.

The transatlantic flight was a punishing task for the engines. On the longest leg, from Newfoundland to Ireland, the plane was in the air for nine hours (and on the return journey, against head winds, the same leg took sixteen and a half hours). Hour after hour the fuel flowed, the plugs sparked, the fourteen cylinders in each enormous engine pumped tirelessly up and down, and the fifteen-foot propellers chopped through clouds and rain and gales.

For Eddie that was the romance of engineering. It was wonderful; it was amazing that men could make engines that would work perfectly and precisely, hour after hour. There were so many things that might have gone wrong, so many moving parts that had to be precision-made and meticulously fitted together so that they would not snap, slip, get blocked or simply wear out while they carried a forty-one-ton airplane over thousands of miles.

By Wednesday morning the Clipper would be ready to do it again.

CHAPTER TWO

The day war broke out was a lovely late-summer Sunday, mild and sunny.

A few minutes before the news was broadcast on the wireless, Margaret Oxenford was outside the sprawling brick mansion that was her family home, perspiring gently in a hat and coat, and fuming because she was forced to go to church. On the far side of the village the single bell in the church tower tolled a monotonous note.

Margaret hated church, but her father would not let her miss the service, even though she was nineteen and old enough to make up her own mind about religion. A year or so ago she had summoned up the nerve to tell him that she did not want to go; but he had refused to listen. Margaret had said: “Don’t you think it’s hypocritical for me to go to church when I don’t believe in God?” Father had replied: “Don’t be ridiculous.” Defeated and angry, she had told her mother that when she was of age she would never go to church again. Mother had said: “That will be up to your husband, dear.” As far as they were concerned the argument was over; but Margaret had seethed with resentment every Sunday morning since then.

Her sister and her brother came out of the house. Elizabeth was twenty-one. She was tall and clumsy and not very pretty. Once upon a time the two sisters had known everything about each other. As girls they had been together constantly for years, for they never went to school, but got a haphazard education at home from governesses and tutors. They had always known one another’s secrets. But lately they had grown apart. In adolescence, Elizabeth had embraced their parents’ rigid traditional values: she was ultraconservative, fervently royalist, blind to new ideas and hostile to change. Margaret had taken the opposite path. She was a feminist and a socialist, interested in jazz music, Cubist painting and free verse. Elizabeth felt Margaret was disloyal to her family in adopting radical ideas. Margaret was irritated by her sister’s foolishness, but she was also very sad and upset that they were no longer intimate friends. She did not have many intimate friends.

Percy was fourteen. He was neither for nor against radical ideas, but he was naturally mischievous, and he empathized with Margaret’s rebelliousness. Fellow-sufferers under their father’s tyranny, they gave one another sympathy and support, and Margaret loved him dearly.

Mother and Father came out a moment later. Father was wearing a hideous orange-and-green tie. He was